Sticking It To The Mann

How did we end up with mostly government run education?

So far in this series, we've been discussing the time frames which
are required to graft technology onto a non-technical culture.
The British ran the Indian education system for 112 years. When
they granted Indian independence in 1947, there were enough
technically-competent Indians to maintain the infrastructure the
British had built; by now, 70 years later, they are extending and
maintaining their infrastructure without British help.

In contrast, Rhodesia had a British system for 51 years but
were unable to maintain their sewers or productive farms after
independence as Zimbabwe in
1980.

The Japanese were never colonized; they did their own technological
grafting under their own initiative, which worked rather well in terms
of also preserving their unique culture.
Depending on how where you start, the Japanese went from a
feudal
muscle-powered farming society to defeating a European naval
power in 1905 in either 36 or 51 years of intense top-down focus on
acquiring
technology.

Becoming a technical society isn't just a matter of teaching a few
selected
people the principles of advanced physics, biology, or electronics,
although that's required. The book Anna and the King of Siam -
well known as the source material for the musical The King and I
- tells how
a British widow named Anna Leonowens taught Western literature, math,
and science
to the children
of the King of Siam.

The royal family learned a lot, and
certainly were better rulers for it, but that did
not make
Siam a technical power. Today, Thailand is a second-world
country; it's been bypassed by many of its neighbors, though it's also
far from being a third-world hellhole. Having Western-educated leadership helped a great deal, but
by itself is not enough.

Weaving technology throughout an entire culture
requires that literal armies of mostly men become technically savvy
enough to build and maintain waterworks, railroads, automobiles, the
electric grid, and much else. This sort of urban infrastructure
is
required for the creation of serious wealth, but maintaining it costs a
lot of toil, time, and treasure. Most of the work is not
particularly pleasant or enlightening but requires a fair amount of
skilled attention to detail.

Perfection is not required, but minimum standards are, and the
closer to perfection the greater the possible wealth. To this
day, cost pressures and
unionized mismanagement make the
Indian electric grid shaky enough that large companies maintain
their own generating systems and Internet plumbing. Running
generators on top of everything else they have to do is very difficult
for small businesses. The unreliability of the shared
infrastructure
makes it hard for small businesses grow to the point of creating
significant numbers of jobs or challenging
incumbents.

Unreliable infrastructure is generally due to a lack of enough
trained people to maintain and expand it; modern Indian public schools
are not particularly effective. They aren't completely
ineffective either: India has been able to grow and progress in wealth
and technology, and the nation is working hard to continually improve
their education system. The quality and breadth of Indian
education puts a cap on the nation's wealth and growth.

The Power of Education

Any nation which wants to grow in wealth and power must pay close
attention to educating the next generation, and America is no
exception. The
great and the good of 17th-century Massachusetts felt that the ability
to read the Bible was so important that literacy education deserved
funding from the "inhabitants in general," that is to say, all
taxpayers regardless of how individual taxpayers might feel about
paying for public education.

There wasn't a lot of concern for teaching
technology at that time because most children were expected to learn
whatever skills
they would need as adults either from their parents or by being
apprenticed to skilled tradesmen; the level of societal scientific
knowledge of the day was low enough that this system worked fairly
well. Still, the colony elders felt that minimum standards of
education were important enough to be provided to all at taxpayer
expense.

No school board would dare to say so today, but the whole reason for
setting up the first American public schools was to further
religious education.
This is clearly stated in the Old Deluder
Satan
Act of 1647.

Towns of fifty families had to hire a schoolmaster
to teach
children to read and write. Towns of a hundred families needed a
grammar schoolmaster to prepare children to attend Harvard
College. Harvard's mission at the time was to prepare young men
for the
ministry. Emphasis on getting kids into the Ivies goes a long way
back, but the Ivies in those days trained students to run churches,
not to run the country.

The Battle of the Ideologies

Knowing how to read the Bible didn't directly make you a better farmer;
Biblical technical knowledge had nothing to do with earning a
living.
Reading what the Bible said about ethics and morality made you a better
person, however, and this was considered to be extremely valuable by
taxpayers of days gone by. The Bible teaches that God wants you
to work hard, an idea with great appeal to the politicians who planned
on collecting taxes earned by those hard workers. What's become
known as the Protestant work ethic was good for the colony, state, and
eventually nation as a whole.

However, even though the religious emphasis of early American public
schools did significantly benefit the economy as a useful side-effect,
that wasn't their original intended purpose. From the very
beginning, American
public schools were first and foremost supposed to indoctrinate
students
with the prevailing ideologies of the day as opposed to
imparting technical skills. That makes fights over
how to run American schools particularly vicious by international
standards: it's not merely about the grades.

Abraham Lincoln stressed the importance of ideological education
in his first public address in 1832:

"Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate any plan
or system respecting it, I can only say that I view it as the
most important subject which we, as a people, can be engaged in,
that every man may receive at least a moderate
education, and thereby be enabled to read the histories of his
own and other countries, by which he may duly appreciate the
value of our free institutions, appears to be an object of vital
importance." [emphasis added]

Mr. Lincoln said nothing about technology or the skills
needed to earn a living. He emphasized the necessity of teaching
students enough literacy and history to appreciate the American
ideology of independence, individual
responsibility, and hard work so that they could appreciate American
freedoms
without being afraid of taking on the accompanying
responsibilities.

In short, Mr. Lincoln emphasized the purely ideological
aspects of the school system; he didn't worry about the technical
ones. This emphasis
would become more and more problematic as technology advanced and
maintaining our civilization required more skills.

To
be fair to Mr. Lincoln, America operated with relatively little
technology as he grew up. The Civil War gave the
traditional wartime push to advance many technologies. Armies
learned
to rely on railroads for logistics and on the telegraph for
communication. Ironclad, steam-powered battleships replaced
wooden sailing ships crewed by "iron men." By the end of the war,
the new technologies offered a great many opportunities for
educated technologists which is why the parochial schools started
teaching them.

As we saw in earlier articles in this series, Baron Macaulay's 1835
decision to operate the Indian schools in
English
put money in the pockets of teachers who were versed in English and
took it away from teachers of Sanskrit or Arabic, but there was no
particular religious or political ideology behind the desire to teach
Indians the technical skills needed for sewer systems,
railroads, and the coming electric grid.

In that sense, Baron Macaulay was considerably more far-sighted
about educational needs than Abraham Lincoln; to be fair, coordinating
the education systems of the British Raj was Baron Macaulay's job,
whereas in President Lincoln's time the Federal government was expected
to have just about nothing to do with education.

Smooth Systems with Less Conflict

It's not as if there aren't examples of other ways to run
educational systems that work far better than ours; but for historical
reasons, they're often less contentious. For example, America has
had advocates for an educational voucher system for decades; this
innovation is resisted tooth and nail by the massed forces of the Left,
with the result that it's barely even been tried.

Yet Sweden, the famous example of successful supposed socialism at
work, has a voucher system where money follows parent's choice
of school; the only way for a school to get more money is by making
parents want to send kids there. Teacher's unions
didn't
like the idea, but there was enough concern for educating children
effectively that the 1994 voucher law had broad support. There
was broad
agreement on what schools should teach so the argument was only about money, not about
teaching religion.

American
educational
philosophy not only directs vast sums of money, it also determines
which ideology will be taught. American edu-wars are not about
mere money; they also concern the ideas that the next generation of
students will hold. This largely determines how they will
vote once they're old enough.

Therefore, American edu-wars are first and foremost about who will hold power in the next
generation; imparting knowledge of any kind is a secondary
concern.

Compulsory Attendance Laws

In the mid-1800s, Massachusetts politician Horace
Mann promoted the "common school" not merely to increase
literacy, and certainly not to prepare a majority of students for
college. His movement, which gave birth to the modern American
public school system, was designed to inculcate good citizenship by
putting
all
kids through a "shared experience" modeled on Prussian
schools.

The Prussian system was designed to prepare most
of a barely-educated population to be ruled over by governing
elites. The governing elites, of course, made sure their children never darkened the
door of a public school; they had private tutors or elite military
academies, as did the Boston
Brahmins of Mr. Mann's social class.

In Mr. Mann's time, America was just beginning to undergo the Great
Migration of immigrants from Europe to America. These newcomers
weren't the
familiar English and Scotsmen. Mr. Mann and his peers were
terrified that non-British immigrants in general and Catholics in
particular
would absorb anti-American ideas if parents were allowed to handle
their
own children's education.

That is why he labored to
persuade legislators to make attending "common school"
compulsory: he wanted to ensure that the next generation of Americans,
no matter who their parents were, were indoctrinated in the values he wanted them to have.
When compulsory attendance laws were first passed in Massachusetts in
1852, there was
considerable resistance:

Our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the state of
Massachusetts
around 1850. It was resisted - sometimes with guns - by an estimated eighty per cent of the
Massachusetts population, the last outpost in
Barnstable on Cape Cod not surrendering its children until the 1880's
when the area was seized by militia
and children marched
to school under guard. [emphasis added]

Yes, you read that right: military
action was needed to round up children whose
deplorable parents didn't approve of Mr. Mann's glorious vision of a
conformist future under the benevolent guidance of the better-educated
elites.

Mr. Mann was correct in his concern that Catholics would resist
having
their children brought up in the Protestant religiosity of the "common
schools." He did achieve victory in the sense of the government
forcing people into formal schooling, but he wasn't able to achieve the
total indoctrination and control he desired. After a considerable
struggle, Catholics won the right
to establish their own parochial schools which taught Catholic dogma
as opposed to Protestant heresies.

By 1890 the Irish, who
controlled the Catholic Church in the U.S., had built an extensive
network of
parochial schools across the urban Northeast and Midwest.
Catholic ethnic groups funded parochial schools to protect their
religion and to enhance their own culture and language, but they also
focused on teaching the technologies which were needed as American
civilization became more complex. As sectarian strife became less
of a problem, Catholic schools developed a reputation for educational
excellence, with perhaps a bit of harmless rosary-thumbing on the side.

John Dewey and Progressive Education

Beginning toward the end of the nineteenth century and stretching
through the middle of the twentieth, not too many decades younger than
Baron Macaulay and Horace Mann, we find the career of American educator
John
Dewey. He wrote more books and pamphlets than you or I could read
in a year, and his major area of focus was on how our educational
system should operate.

He agreed with the emphasis on ideology
which had been part of our system since the beginning. In “My
Pedagogic Creed”, was published in 1897, he added the
foundational principle that technical and factual information
should be de-emphasized:

I believe that we violate the child's nature and render difficult
the best ethical results, by introducing the child too abruptly
to a number of special studies, of reading, writing, geography,
etc., out of relation to this social life.

I believe, therefore, that the true center of correlation on the
school subjects is not science, nor literature, nor history, nor
geography, but the child's own social activities.

Dewey shared the Prussian view that children go to school to learn
how to be members of a group, but he intended them to do so via
participating in "social
activities" as designed by himself. He differed profoundly from
his
predecessors
in advising that schools intentionally not emphasize literacy:

It is one of the great mistakes of education to make reading and
writing constitute the bulk of the school work the first two
years. The true way is to teach them incidentally as the
outgrowth of the social activities at this time. Thus language
is not primarily the expression of thought, but the means of
social communication. ...

The plea for the predominance of learning to read in early
school-life because of the great importance attaching to
literature seems to me a perversion.

Mr. Dewey wasn't at all stupid: he knew that the parents of
his unwilling victims were hardly likely to take kindly to an
educational approach that minimized actual, um, education. His warning to his
fellow progressives made it clear that he
realized that his advice would not be any more acceptable to the
non-expert public
than
Mr. Mann's compulsory education laws; his conspiracies
against literacy would have to be implemented slowly:

Change must come gradually. To force it unduly would compromise
its final success by favoring a
violent reaction. [emphasis added]

He knew that parents, being practical and commonsensical folks,
would
rightly not believe that his changes would
benefit their children, even to the point of violent resistance.
So, like the classic frog in hot water, they would have to be
introduced to Dewey's control by
stealth and deception, one step at a time.

In pursuit of his goals, he created a spectacularly successful
albeit
slow-moving revolution that, over a century or more, has utterly
destroyed what once was the world's finest primary education
system. He demonstrated an approach that has been emulated by
leftists ever since:
John Dewey pioneered what has become known as the Long March Through the Institutions.

The actual term was a slogan coined a century later by student
activist Rudi Dutschke to describe
his strategy for establishing the conditions for revolution: subverting
society
by infiltrating institutions such as the professions. The
phrase "long march" is a reference to the prolonged struggle of the
Chinese communists, which included a physical Long March of their army
across China.

Indeed, it took Mr. Dewey's successors the better
part of a century to destroy the American educational system.
Despite not having the term ready-made, John Dewey understood the
concept intimately, and communicated it to generations of leftist
educrats down to this day.

What Hath Progressives Wrought?

On July 25, 1991, after 26 years of teaching in public schools,
John Taylor Gatto wrote a public letter of resignation that was
published as an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. He
asserted:

Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It
kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by
teaching disrespect for home and parents. An exaggeration?
Hardly. Parents aren't meant to participate in our form of schooling,
rhetoric to the contrary. My orders as schoolteacher are to make
children fit an animal training system, not to help each find his or
her personal path.

Mr. Gatto had recognized that the public school system had been
designed from the very start to teach the conformity required by elites
ruling over the masses. It was also required of assembly-line
workers
where management required that someone put an oil pan on an engine
every 15 seconds all day, every day. He later went on to explore
the
lessons of the public education system as he found it.

Gatto's book The Underground History of American
Education tied educational philosophy back to the Prussian
system so beloved of
Horace Mann. He was convinced that the switch from phonics-based
reading to "look/say" whole word recognition was responsible for the
doubling of the black American illiteracy rate and the quadrupling of
whites' illiteracy rate from 1940 to 2000, just as Mr. Dewey had
planned. Gatto says:

After the Civil War, Utopian speculative analysis regarding
isolation
of children in custodial compounds where they could be subjected to
deliberate molding routines, began to be discussed seriously by the
Northeastern policy elites of business, government, and university
life…effective early indoctrination of all children would lead to an
orderly scientific society, one controlled by the best people,
now freed from the obsolete
straitjacket of democratic traditions and
historic American libertarian
attitudes. [emphasis added]

This represented a switch away from the ideology of freedom and
responsible democracy advocated by Abraham Lincoln toward a conformist
tradition where the "best people" make all the decisions. Indeed,
we
see colleges and large Internet businesses such as Facebook,
Twitter, Google, and Apple facilitating "early indoctrination of all
children" by systematically censoring anyone who advocates traditional
American values on the grounds of "intolerance" or "hate speech."

"Plans are underway to replace community, family and church with
propaganda, education and mass media… the State shakes loose from
Church, reaches out to School… People are only little plastic lumps of
human dough."'

A century later, Mr. Ross' 1901 dream has come to pass. Church
attendance and
influence have indeed declined precipitously, schools teach a uniform
brand of
group-think which is weak on the traditional 3 Rs of "reading, writing,
and 'rithmetic", and the Twitterverse
stands ready to subject
nonconformists
to public shaming.

As with the Catholics who pushed back against Mr. Mann's "common
schools" in the late 1800s, parents who abhorred the ideological
conformity and low factual standards of the public schools sought to
protect their children from what they regarded as anathema. The
homeschooling movement was driven by parents who couldn't afford to
send their children to private schools but were willing to sacrifice
time, talent, and treasure to
teach their children the complexities of today's society.

The public schools were unwilling to change their secular ideology,
so they resorted to political action to compel these deplorable rebels
to put their kids back in the public schools. After several
decades of political struggle, homeschooling has become legal in all 50
states. Notwithstanding its legality, parents have had to band
together to protect themselves against ambitious bureaucrats who seek
any opportunity or excuse to force kids back into their system.

This is partly for financial reasons - most states supplement the local
property taxes that pay for schools with state funds which are based
on the number of kids in each class. It's becoming clear
that being able to enforce conformity to the prevailing ideology
is just as important to our ruling elites.

The next article in this series discusses the homeschooling movement
and explains how Mr. Dewey's progressives got away with their
deliberate
lowering of the educational standards of the public schools.

Thanks for another fine piece. By 1974, after four years, I'd finally had enough of trying to understand the real motivations of the school system which employed me...and I quit. I sent a letter to the school board explaining my conviction that the educational level of the entire system could be elevated pretty substantially with a bit more effort and the setting of higher expectations of the staff. I said that I was leaving because I'd finally come to cynical conclusion that the system, as operated, turned out the exact mix of dropouts, high school grads and college material that fit what someone thought best met the needs of society, and altering the ratio would only cause trouble. It was either that, or I was just learning how incredibly lazy and selfish public servants could be. Not much has changed, except for the disappearance of any semblance of discipline. Sure wish I could spot any positive changes on the horizon....but I can't.

January 9, 2019 8:56 PM

bsinn said:

Very thoughtful piece. I would love it if you explore the elite private schools that seem to produce most of our presidents. Democrat or Republican...they tell you that public education is for you, but MY kids go to a private school. Whether it is the Bushes ( Andover), Obama ( Puntaloa for him , Sidwell Friends for his kids), Kennedy's Choate or Roosevelt's Groton the leaders opt out of the public school system. What do these schools have that the " chosen" public schools don't have ? What does the "A" team have that the rest of the chumps don't ?

January 9, 2019 10:23 PM

Petrarch said:

Now that's a fascinating question. As it happens, I went to a private school, which provided a truly excellent quality education - BUT it was nothing like the sort of school that, say, the Bushes go to. It was a small, penniless religious school that just happened to have really excellent and dedicated teachers.

I haven't read very good things about the "elite" schools. We've all heard the stories about Brett Kavanaugh's school, and Lady Gaga is another alumnus of a similar sort of place. Yet they do seem to set them up for apparent success.

Interesting avenue of inquiry, that would be well worth an answer if we can figure out a way to effectively pursue it.

January 9, 2019 11:09 PM

Kay said:

Is it primarily the social connections made in private schools, rather than educational excellence, that lead to success?

January 10, 2019 1:38 PM

Petrarch said:

I'm guessing so. It's striking how often you hear about "this famous politician/businessman/entertainer was roommates with that other famous entertainer/politician/businessman." People with totally different career paths, and not related by family, but the common points are a) both super-successful and b) the same school. That can't be education - no school can be the best at teaching every possible subject. It can only be the connections - not what you know, but who you know. I read somewhere that the current purpose of our Ivies is as a place for our budding elites to "meet and mate."

But if that were all it is, then in effect our lives are predetermined by what college you get in to (doesn't so much matter whether you graduate or not, as Bill Gates and Michael Dell did not). Surely it's not all as deterministic as that?

January 10, 2019 5:20 PM

Kay said:

People can succeed without those connections, but they are the exceptions. I think the connections enable more ordinary people—intelligent, but far from brilliant—to enter and succeed in careers that would otherwise be open only to people of truly outstanding talent.